By Des Cowley.
LORETTA PALMEIRO & MARK ISAACS – SONATA FOR SOPRANO SAXOPHONE AND PIANO (Gracemusic/MGM, Digital release)
Sydney duo – pianist Mark Isaacs and soprano saxophonist Loretta Palmeiro – are something of a dream team. The pair spent a lot of time playing music together privately – purely for the joy of it – before making their major public debut at the 2017 Sydney International Women’s Jazz Festival. Since then, performances have been intermittent at best, a fact that goes hand in hand with Isaacs’ unwavering belief in the need for preparation and practice (even when improvising), coupled with a strong desire for perfectionism.
The duo’s music first came to my attention during the COVID pandemic. On 27 March 2020, just weeks into the first lockdown, they inaugurated the Sydney Improvised Music Association’s streaming series “A Meditation in Jazz”, a program intended to bring music into our lounge-rooms at a time when physical music was a fast-fading chimera. Their outstanding contribution to the series, performed in an empty, wood-panelled recording studio, can be viewed on YouTube: (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EL53E-nCxzY)
The three pieces Isaacs and Palmeiro played – spontaneous improvisations – were digitally released a few months later, under the title All Who Travel with Us. The EP – comprising some 27-minutes of music – was a breathtaking demonstration that blended exceptional musicianship with the sort of close-knit interplay and unbridled trust essential to playing without a net.
It feels something of a turnaround, then, that Isaacs has changed tack for his and Palmeiro’s latest work. Rather than persisting with their extemporaneous adventures, he has instead opted to compose a Sonata for Soprano Saxophone and Piano. Of course, anyone who’s followed Isaacs’ career will be nonplussed by the move. From the outset, his life-long devotion to music – extending more than six decades – has comfortably straddled classical and jazz. For Isaacs, the two genres are distinguished merely by the presence or absence of improvisation. We could say as much about Keith Jarrett’s take on Bach, or Stravinsky’s rollicking ‘Ebony Concerto’.
Isaacs’ Sonata was written in 2023 – specifically for Loretta Palmeiro, to whom it is dedicated – and given its premiere in 2025 at St Stephens Uniting Church, Sydney (the live performance was recorded for this release, and can also be viewed as a music video on YouTube). While it incorporates the language of jazz – especially Palmeiro’s soaring, passionate soprano sax – the work has been fully notated. As such, it presents a radical shift in the duo’s trajectory. Nonetheless, it manages to retain much of Isaacs’ and Palmeiro’s signature style: the same sense of intimacy, the same conversational to and fro, the same emphasis on close-listening, all of which can be found on their previous recordings All Who Travel with Us, and debut EP The Present (2020).
The Sonata’s three-movements – Rhapsody, Benediction, Fiesta – comprise just 18-minutes of music, but such is the intense focus and expansive nature of the piece, it has the feel of a larger work. Rhapsody is inaugurated by Isaacs’s piano, stately and lyrical, as it lays the tracks for Palmeiro’s soprano, which takes flight, soaring and gliding. The purity of her tone, mostly played in the upper register, dovetails with Isaacs’ increasingly lush piano, generating an aura of apprehension and foreboding. Benediction, by contrast, forms an introspective centrepiece, its mood full of ache and yearning. Palmeiro’s disconsolate sax, almost a whisper, journeys across a bed of sparse piano, slowly welling, as if searching for a path through a desolate maze. The finale Fiesta injects a degree of hard-won rapture, its animated fanfare engendering a degree of resolution and closure.
I’m not sure what religion – if any – Isaacs adheres to (though, with his long, grey hair and overflowing beard, he increasingly presents as a visionary prophet). But I think it’s fair to say there’s a spiritual element to this music. At its core is an intense seeking, combined with mystery and exaltation. Isaacs’ classical compositions – and we could say the same for his jazz improvisations – elevate melody over discord, and the Sonata is no exception. In Loretta Palmeiro, he has found the ideal musical partner with whom to realise his conception of a classically oriented work uniting soprano saxophone with piano. Above all, it’s a deeply-felt composition, full of fragile and memorable themes, that traverses a range of moods within a short space. Like everything Isaacs does, there’s a sense of a lifetime’s music-making, thought, reflection, and practice nestled within. One need only heed the rapturous applause that greets the end of this live recording to gauge its success.
The Sonata for Soprano Saxophone and Piano recording will be launched in concert on Sunday 24 May 2026, 4-5pm, Phoenix Central Park’s The Church, Alexandria, Sydney.
Tickets are FREE, but it is necessary to enter the ballot to book seat/s. Link for more details and to enter the ballot which closes on May 19:
Loretta Palmeiro x Mark Isaacs at The Church — Phoenix Central Park